I've always wondered whether this was just an indicator of colour perception problems among Kentuckians, or if there is some other perfectly logical explanation for it. Oh, if only there was someone here from Kentucky who could enlighten us all by posting the answer to this query!

Max grumbled ... Oh, if only there was someone here from Kentucky who could enlighten us all by posting the answer to this query!

Max, Louisville ain't all that far from Kentucky. Maybe you should ask Jackie to nip over and check it all out for you!

Ditto the Blue Mountains just west of Sydney. They don't look blue to me, although apparently they have a bluish haze or tint.

I guess it may be that put next to something more 'traditionally' green, these things have a blue tinge.

Colour is notoriously hard to pin down precisely in words. The Chinese (Mandarin) word 'qing' is used for the blue of the sky and the purple of distant mountains and the green of grass. The Japanese use the same character (and pronounce it aoi) for the green of traffic lights.

Max, Louisville ain't all that far from Kentucky.

Foiled again! I received some bad news today, and decided to cheer myself up with a little puckish fun. I posted the "bluegrass" question in a deliberate attempt to lure Jackie into posting, knowing that she is striving mightily to avoid being first to 1100. I even reset my personal preferences to decline personal messages, hoping to force her to post her answer publicly. After all that, I remembered that she has already thrown herself into the arms of Morpheus! Damn!

In reply to:

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Colour is notoriously hard to pin down precisely in words. The Chinese (Mandarin) word 'qing' is used for the blue of the sky and the purple of distant mountains and the green of grass. The Japanese use the same character (and pronounce it aoi) for the green of traffic lights.

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Apparently different languages have different numbers of important colour words, and which colours will be included progresses in a predictable way, so that for example, if there is a word for red there will be a word for blue but not necessariy vice versa. I'll try and find my reference for this.

Bingley

Max stammered, mightly p---ed off at CK: Foiled again!

Oops - my speciality ...

And he scandalously went on: After all that, I remembered that she has already thrown herself into the arms of Morpheus!

Max, WHAT are you suggesting! Jackie's a married woman!

And on that (slightly) blue note, I'll leave.

Kentucky blue grass is blue-- the way a blue spruce is blue, or the way some Hosta's are blue-- which is to say is a shade of green with a definite bluish cast– it is America's native bamboo– somehow, bamboo is different than other grasses-- but the details of the difference are lost. Any one with more knowledge of botany?

I have the habit of reading– and unlike those of you who have gone to university and actually learned one or two subjects extreme well, and many subjects very well, I am more of jack of all trades. I read a bit of this and a bit of that, and know a little, and then forget half of it, about all sorts of things.. like blue grass being a bamboo and not just a grass and then forgetting how bamboo differs from grass.

Apparently different languages have different numbers of important colour words, and which colours will be included progresses in a predictable way, so that for example, if there is a word for red there will be a word for blue but not necessariy vice versa. I'll try and find my reference for this.

yes, I have seen/read discussions about this.
It usually starts with Homer– and his "wine dark sea" and did the Greeks see the colors blue and red as being shades of the same color– since wine tends to be red.

Wine stains, and the stains can start red, and then dry to blue– so characterizing red as being a shade of blue is not as hard as we might think.( See more on this below)

But I have always thought he was comparing the normally clear water of the Aegean with the muddied waters of a storm– and the sea was dark with sediment as wine is dark with sediment, rather than the color...

Color is just a specific frequency of light, that the human optic nerves respond to in almost the same way, but how we label the resulting color is cultural. Is teal green or is it blue?

There are also certain dyes for silk, that are like a litmus paper– the pale sky blue dye changes color as it ages and goes to a pale lavender, and then to pink–one of my first silk blouses had this characteristic.
And this sort of color change also occurs in nature...

It is interesting to look at crayons, or other art material and see the names colors are given. Some are pretty clear cut– titanium white, or chrome yellow, but ‘sky blue"? Or taupe? Some colors, to me, that have a very specific meanings –Ecru which is raw linen color– also known as tow (as in "tow haired boy with cheeks of tan"(Walt Whitman?))have come to mean any number of shades of pale beige.

Well to be honest, tow is unspun linen, and spun and woven linen is ecru..and they are not quite the same color, but they are very close.

>Walt Whitman?

Whittier. Though almost a third of the first dozen or so web sites that you hit with a google search of "barefoot boy with cheeks of tan" say James Whitcombe Riley!

There is, of course, a very wonderful pun (are there any other sorts of puns?) that relies in this poem for inspiration.

maybe there are two different poems with barefoot boys?

I always remember the "tow haired"-- since it was applied to me as a child,( i was tow haired. )
the "blonde" i have now is thanks to lady clairol, since it now is ashier and darker..except for the grey!

>maybe there are two different poems with barefoot boys?

well of course there are!

Barefoot Boy.
With Cheeks Of Tan.
Won't Let Them Chap.
When He's A Man.
-Burma Shave.

of troy surprised me with: since it now is ashier and darker..except for the grey

Who would have thunk it - a native Noo Yorker who spells grey properly? Way to go, Helen!

"Tow" isn't a colour generally recognised by most New Zealanders (at least according to my exhaustive statistically-correct survey where n = 1).

Most NZers would be looking for the metal eye sticking out of the boy's head, with steel cable tow-rope an optional extra.

> in a deliberate attempt to lure Jackie into posting, knowing that
> she is striving mightily to avoid being first to 1100. I even reset my personal preferences to decline
> personal messages, hoping to force her to post her answer publicly.

Max
A thread on grass is not the way to get Jackie to post.
Try a thread related to human relations and people - and watch the results.

In reply to:

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Max
A thread on grass is not the way to get Jackie to post.
Try a thread related to human relations and people - and watch the results.

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I'm sure you're right. However, somewhere in my malformed psyche, there was a small shred of human decency left, and it has prompted me to abandon any further attempts at weakening Jackie's resolve. Her awesome self-restraint should be applauded, not sabotaged.

Et tu, Maxé!

Fine time to do a turn-around, my friend! Uh-uh, no way,
too late! Deliberate malice aforethought! In fact---
c'mere a minute, I want to queen your plordle.

And--AND! You said: "Who would have thunk it - a native Noo Yorker who spells grey properly? Way to go, Helen!"
I have spelt it that way, but do I get any acknowledgement?? NO! So--hrmph, grumble, and mutter!

Carpe Quordlepleen!


Love,

The Last Murderess-I-mean-Worderess

Jackie raged: In fact---c'mere a minute, I want to queen your plordle.

Well, Avy, there you are. She's turned it around to human relations. And it doesn't look good for anyone, particularly for our soon-to-be-late Max with the Queened Plordle. Can I watch? Sounds like the whole chicken to me!

through the miracle of google, I have finally discovered the definitive word on this age old (viz. graying) debate:

gray wolves are the only wolves in Norrath who drop the medium quallity pelt needed for tailoring whips. grey wolves do not drop this pelt.

And Dornford Yates, that most English of English light-novelists, always spelt it as "gray."

e.g - Jill's gray eyes looked up at me gravely - - -

gray wolves are the only wolves in Norrath who drop the medium quallity pelt needed for tailoring whips. grey wolves do not drop this pelt.

I used to play that game, it's pretty good, but it costs $9.89 a month. Of, course, I cancelled it when I found this place.

Apparently languages differ in the number of basic colour words they have (basic ones being those with a simple name rather than a compound one (blue rather than sky blue or greenish blue) and reasonably common (no cerise)). It seems that if you know how many of these basic colour words a language has it's possible to make a pretty good guess which ones are in and which ones aren't.

The list (from David Crystal's Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language) goes:

* black and white
* red
* green yellow
* blue
* brown
* purple pink orange grey

So a language that has a word lower down the list (brown for example) will have all the words higher up the list, but may or may not have the words lower down the list. Where there's more than one word in a slot the order in which they're added is random. A language with four words, for example, may have black, white, red, green or black, white, red, yellow.

Bingley

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barefoot boy with cheeks of tan

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Harking back to another recent thread which was explored ad absurdum, there is a famous shaggy dog story involving a Chinese lumber merchant and a pet bear with no hair on its feet. It ends, "Ho there, boyfoot bear with teaks of Chan!" (humbly begging pardon for that

* black and white
* red
* green yellow
* blue
* brown
* purple pink orange grey


Does this mean that English is extremely sophistocated with maroon, indigo, teal, crimson, scarlet, beige and navy being common words?

Jazz asked: Does this mean that English is extremely sophistocated with maroon, indigo, teal, crimson, scarlet, beige and navy being common words?

Possibly, using Bingley's definition. More likely, however, is the packrat mentality of English speakers. Never have one word for something when 50 will do.

Having so many words for colours may appear sophisticated, but everyone, and I mean everyone has a markedly different mental rendering of each named colour. It's plain inefficient. It's also what gives the language its charm ...

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* black and white
* red
* green yellow
* blue
* brown
* purple pink orange grey


Does this mean that English is extremely sophistocated with maroon, indigo, teal, crimson, scarlet, beige and navy being common words?

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Not really. We're only talking about basic colours. Crimson and scarlet are types of red so they don't count. Similarly navy is a type of blue and beige is a type of brown. As for maroon, indigo, and teal, have you ever tried to get a group of people, never mind AWADers, to agree on what colours these words actually refer to? The basic colours may have fuzzy boundaries, but everyone who isn't actually colour blind agrees on the central colour covered by each term.



Bingley

I saw a fabulous exhibit once which was basically a rectangle of gradate colour. One end of the rainbow to the other from left to right, darkest of dark to palest of pale up and down. So far, not too exciting, but on top of this colour scale were drawn boundaries, which looked totally arbitrary to an English speaker, but actually mapped the colour range covered by specific words in another language. (I think the other language was something Polynesian, but my memory has gone...)
The fascinating part was staring at a polygon ranging from pale green to deep orange (or wahtever) and trying to 'see' the simliarity in these colours that made the Polynesians see them all as variations of the same thing.
Words really do affect how people see the world.

packrat mentality...plain inefficient

I can't agree with many of your comments here, Cap. I think the proliferation of different terms in English represents nothing more nor less than the rich cultural history of an island race that has always looked outwards - whether defensively or as trade-inspired travel.

Mav said: I can't agree with many of your comments here, Cap. I think the proliferation of different terms in English represents nothing more nor less than the rich cultural history of an island race that has always looked outwards - whether defensively or as trade-inspired travel.

True. But we don't unload linguistic leftovers, we simply add them to the pile on the side of the plate. How many other languages have so many words for the same thing - albeit with slight differences in meaning or usage in context? I stand by my statement and I believe I can do that without contradicting yours!

I wasn't commenting on whether this was good or bad. It is inefficient, as I said. From a technical, linguistic viewpoint. I wasn't commenting on the cultural background or beauty or otherwise of the language. It is and has all of those things. But it is inefficient!

inefficient

Still disagree. It is not inherently inefficient to have seven different words, if they convey seven shades of meaning. You could more accurately argue that more impoverished langauges like say French, which might only drum up three correlative words, is the technically inefficient langauge, having to compromise accuracy in favour of a smaller vocabulary.

if we had (say) only eight (words for) colors, what do you suppose the Big Box of (64?) Crayolas would look like?

trying to 'see' the similarity in these colours that made the Polynesians see them all as variations of the same thing.

This thread is so wonderful– I am tone deaf-really, really bad when it come to music, but from early childhood, I've had a great sense of color.... Many times, my mother would send me to buy buttons or threads or other notions for things that she was sewing.. Once in a while she would question a color of thread– but inevitable she recognized I was right.

One time, I bought "purple" thread for some fabric she saw as brown– she first looked at me as if I had two heads, and even went so far as to send me back to the store to get a spool of brown, but in the end she used the "purple thread"–

Bridget, I have seen the color cubes (and flat plates of color ranges) but I have never seen the kind of overlay you mentioned... I would love to see it. I often find myself seeing colors other define as "pink" as purple– or some browns as purple, and greys as pink– and reading this, you might find it totally weird– but it makes sense to me..
I also can automatically compensate for the difference that happen when you move from flourescent light to incandescent light, to sun light..

from a technical point of view, of course, any color can be defined as a frequence of light– and computers use RBG values, octal or hex depending on your OS– and hue, saturation and luminosity can also effect color.

There was a book on the chemical/physical nature of color some years ago– it was way beyond my math knowledge, and it discussed some of this. Music lover/students will have to help me– in western music, we use certain harmonies, (take a length of sting, pluck it to make tone 1– divide the string in half- and you go up one tone– divide again, ect..)
.
But not all music uses this set of tonal values— Celtic, Chinese, and Japanese (and others) music use a total different set of tones than western sets "A , B, C, D, E, F, G" (with sharps and flats–) which is why is often sound strange–(off key, or screeching–) and is truly hated (many modern Celtic piece have be reset to western music– but most bagpipes are still set to the celtic "scales")

With color, the same is true– some cultures see different "break" points– but when these are analyzed as frequencies, they follow very fixed mathematical rules– Its as if, in a decimal based color world–they are using octal!

and I collect kaleidoscope, of course.

Capital Kiwi wrote : Having so many words for colours may appear sophisticated, but everyone, and I mean everyone has a markedly different mental rendering of each named colour. It's plain inef